I offer a little poetic justice for Housman

There is a piece in this week's Spectator which simply calls out for an immediate response. Actually, it goes a bit further than that. The writer, Paul Johnson, gets down on bended knee, quill between his teeth, and craves a boon, pleading "give me your answer, kind readers, I beseech you". Very well. This reader is only too happy to oblige.

In his ninth decade, Johnson remains immensely readable, though, as my headmaster used to say of Saint-Simon, the chronicler of life at the court of the Sun King, he tends to be "entertaining, but not always reliable". A superb essayist, by turns wise and choleric, he cannot resist bowling a googly now and then. The problem is, nobody has any difficulty in spotting it.

This week's wrong'un, I'm afraid, must be carted into the trees at midwicket. Johnson has selected his 10 favourite short poems in our language, although, as he admits, Milton's Light weighs in at 55 lines, which is not really "short". We'll let that pass. Set beside Paradise Lost, or Comus, or even Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, it is a mere bagatelle.

He chooses Shakespeare, of course (though not one of the Sonnets), and Shelley's Ozymandias, which cannot be kept off any list of great short poems. There are places for Herbert and Herrick, Tennyson and Hopkins, for Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth, and, regrettably, for Francis Thompson's second-rate At Lord's, notwithstanding those ghostly "run-stealers" who "flicker to and fro".

Fair enough, you might say. It's a personal list, as partial as any other. But hark! What is that sound of sentimental slush, spraying in all directions like some ill-directed geyser? It can't be! Once more Mr Yeats is being rolled out, shamelessly, so we can all wallow in the pigswill called The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Of all the poems he could have chosen by Yeats, Johnson has opted for the wettest. Not just the wettest that Yeats wrote, but possibly the most dripping-wet poem written by any great poet. Cloyingly sentimental, Innisfree is a risible example of how not to recollect the past.

The poem has an interesting story. In 1888, Yeats, then 23, was living in London, and was walking along the Strand one winter's day when a shop display carried him back to Sligo. Yet even he grew tired of the poem's popularity. It proved so popular, in fact, that it was once sung by 2,000 boy scouts, not an honour bestowed upon Byzantium or The Circus Animals' Desertion, which are truly great poems.

So much for your googly, Mr Johnson. But as you retrieve the ball from a nearby meadow, there is plenty of time to reflect on your folly; in particular, the baffling omission of the man who wrote more memorable short poems in English than any other. A.E Housman was born in 1859, six years before Yeats, and it is foolish to pretend he was a "greater" poet, though he certainly achieved greatness. "We should all write poetry like Housman," said T.S Eliot, who was greater than both, "if only we could."

What Eliot meant, and what Housman's readers recognise, is that he had an incomparable gift of compression. Housman's may be a small world, emotionally, but it is a deep one. As the finest classical scholar of his day, he understood the absolute importance of rigour in the use of language, and the mythical quality of poetry.

Not for Housman the evocation of a world that can be recreated at will, as Yeats sought to recreate it in his gooey poem. "I can return at any time," he seems to be saying, which none of us can, however much we may wish it. This is dishonesty, the most signal offence a poet can commit, dressed up in pretty language.

In his best-known poem, about "the land of lost content", Housman was more truthful. When he wrote of "the happy highways where I went, and cannot come again", he was putting truth before rhetoric, as poets should. That is what makes his voice so affecting.

Time and again, Housman manages to write short poems, many no longer than eight lines, which reveal the world in its natural state, without a trace of sentimentality. It is an unforgiving world, but at its best it has a "rightness" that makes him thoroughly admirable. This man was never deceived by life.

Housman has to go into that top ten, but which poem serves him best? We'll throw in Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, one of those eight-line marvels that convey a whole realm of human experience. Keeping Shelley, there are eight more short poems to fit in. Hardy must be there, represented by Before Life and After, and we can liberate Yeats from the bondage of his bee-loud glade by offering An Acre of Grass. Auden's Brussels in Winter and Larkin's Next, Please are top-notchers, and there is room for two more 20th-century masters.

Robert Frost's The Road not Taken may be well known but should never be disqualified on that count, and In My Craft Or Sullen Art shows that notorious windbag, Dylan Thomas, at his most touching.

The list may be completed by John Clare's A Vision, and the Shakespeare sonnet that begins, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds…". All are great poems. None is longer than 24 lines. And there's not a googly in sight.